Reviews

Nature Isn’t Always Nice: On Megan Kaminski’s ‘Gentlewomen’

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Kaminski’s poetic speakers take aim at patriarchal and humanistic hubris, the aggregating centuries during which men have bent both heaven and earth to their methods.
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Reviews

Who Is Unthinkable? On Imbolo Mbue’s ‘How Beautiful We Were’

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Apocalypse, Mbue seems to say, is not mysterious, unimaginable, or unthinkable. It has been confronted many times before, by many different communities and people, and it will be confronted many times to come.
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Reviews

True Love is Feeding Yourself: On Melissa Broder’s ‘Milk Fed’

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Milk Fed might make you hungry. Milk Fed might make you horny. Milk Fed might make you believe in god, or in love, or at least make you want to try.
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Reviews

Between Fact, Fiction, and Memory: On Daniel Loedel’s ‘Hades, Argentina’

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A specific past is more likely to be remembered than a generic one, and remembering the dead and disappeared more specifically honors their memory in a way that broad brush-strokes cannot.
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Reviews

The Stories We Become: On William Cash’s ‘Restoration Heart’

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Cash’s memoir is the story of a man whose penchant for letters suggests a desire to hold on to the present. Sealing up the envelope means ending the letter: allowing our fantasies and stories to be finished, read, and judged.
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Reviews

Past Made Present: On Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s ‘Photostats’

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I’m wondering, when will there be an intervention, a disruption, a reckoning with the current trajectory we’ve taken? Perhaps it begins with the 2020 elections and becomes something we enact daily.
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Reviews

The Narrative Drama Triangle: On Sayed Kashua’s ‘Track Changes’

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That is the complicated relation of truth to fiction: although the story is a lie, the emotions couldn’t be more real.
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Reviews

A Liturgy of Language: On Don DeLillo’s ‘The Silence’

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The end will take us all by surprise, but that there will be an end is not surprising. DeLillo is the laureate of this unsettling truth.
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Reviews

The Light and the Dark: On Ali Smith’s ‘Summer’

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Summer brings us a completion of the cycle of seasons: suffering to hope, green to gray, life to death, and back again. Or all of them at once. Or not really at all.
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Reviews

Correcting History: On C Pam Zhang’s ‘How Much of These Hills Is Gold’

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We need many more novels like this one: novels that breathe life into people who have gone unseen too long.
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Reviews

Humble Words Organized Beautifully: Ward Farnsworth on Style

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Farnsworth's philosophy of composition is wonderfully anarchic when compared to the partisans of prescription who dominate the writing classroom and the style-guide racket.
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Reviews

Kent Russell’s Long March

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Russell's new book is sure to make readers foam all over again. Not because it’s a bad book, but because it is wildly uneven—with flashes of brilliance bogged down by half-baked analysis and muddy writing.
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Reviews

A Nightingale in the Lion’s Den

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Kaya Genç wanted his nonfiction to read like fiction. If that is the litmus test, The Lion and the Nightingale earns its keep.
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Reviews

The Mystery of the Other and Preoccupation with the Self: On Meng Jin’s ‘Little Gods’

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When one says, “Oh, they are just different,” what he is really doing is reconciling ignorance and indifference.
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Reviews

Questioning Her Own Questioning: On Leslie Jamison’s ‘Make It Scream, Make It Burn’

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As skeptical as Jamison has become of skepticism, she’s still a skeptic in a certain essayistic sense: she’s always digging deeper, refusing to trust surface appearances.
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Reviews

Confronting Hypocrisy on the Page: On Jonathan Safran Foer’s ‘We Are the Weather’

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What could be misconstrued as a pedantic and mildly pejorative tome extolling the virtues of veganism is actually an investigation of our daily choices, what they say about us as individuals and what they could say about humanity.
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Reviews

Modern Feminism’s Big Lie: On ‘Fleishman Is in Trouble’

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The problem is the lie the women have been fed: that sexism is over and the world is fair and that if a woman plays her cards right, she can avoid disappearing.
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Reviews

Amazing Grace: Reading Kelly J. Beard’s ‘An Imperfect Rapture’

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For another memoirist, it would be easy to resort to a rhetoric of absolutes, but Beard’s elegant and direct prose teems with complexity and nuance.
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